Just days after rival Google launched testing for a service for tracking individuals' Web activities, Yahoo has launched a beta version of its own personal search tools. Known as "My Web", the service will allow users to save, share and organize Web pages. There are also additional tools for adding notes to pages saved for reference and for saving a link to the Web page, and so forth. It is possible for a user to examine all of their search requests and results with relative ease.

Yahoo first introduced its personal search offering last October. Slightly different than what Google has introduced, it allows people to do standard Web searches but provides more ways to use the resulting information.

Links can be saved to an archive, for instance. And using Really Simple Syndication (RSS), users can share links with other people.

These kinds of services, however useful they might turn out to be, have raised some concerns over privacy, in an era where we already have to worry about spyware and other issues of privacy invasion.